Note 64 — Front matter

"Every one of my writings," says Goethe, "has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, by a thousand different things. The learned and the ignorant, the wise and the foolish, infancy and age, have come in turn, generally without having been the least suspicious of it, to bring me the offering of their thoughts, their faculties, their experience; often have they sown the harvest I have reaped. My work is that of an aggregation of human beings taken from the whole of nature; it bears the name of Goethe."